Healthcare consumers’ expectations for easier, faster, retail-like experiences are not fading away. It is no longer enough to offer a digital front door alone — healthcare organizations (HCOs) must intercept consumers and customers as they navigate an increasingly complex and diverse healthcare ecosystem. To remain competitive, health systems and health insurers must embrace data-driven experiences that deliver more choice and personalization and that create value for the customer. HCOs, including providers and insurers, must establish new ways of engaging consumers to drive acquisition, sustain engagement, differentiate their offerings, and (re-)establish trust. Enter customer experience platforms for healthcare.
What Are Customer Experience Platforms?
Forrester defines customer experience platforms for healthcare as technologies that orchestrate seamless, personalized healthcare experiences at every touchpoint to drive sustained customer engagement that improves customer loyalty and trust. HCOs use these platforms to create value with their customers and move beyond transactional engagements to put the consumer in the driver’s seat.
Where Is This Market Headed?
The customer experience (CX) platforms for healthcare market is evolving rapidly. As many HCOs have faced the need to piece together multiple point solutions, some end-to-end solutions are emerging through native development and acquisitions. CX platforms for healthcare is an established market that:
- Understands the importance of quality data. HCOs are drowning in data but lack access to critical consumer data that lives outside the electronic health record (EHR) or claims history. HCOs are investing in technology and services that help them acquire and transform key data into actionable insights that have uses across multiple applications for consumers and employees.
- Provides necessary visibility into the customer journey. Healthcare leaders have long struggled to piece together the full customer journey and measure intervention effectiveness due to fragmentation and disparate data. Customer experience platforms for healthcare enable longitudinal mapping and integrated data that paints a clear picture of customers, their behavior, and the effectiveness of campaigns directed at them.
- Creates value for the customer beyond the transaction. Scheduling an appointment, choosing benefits, paying a bill, or similar transactions don’t create value. Outcomes achieved over time do. At the heart of value creation lies a deep understanding of the customer’s unique needs and motivations, which allows HCOs to deliver personalized, anticipatory, and well-orchestrated experiences.
Forrester clients interested in learning more about the CX platforms for healthcare market can read the full landscape report here. Learn more about the top core and extended use cases, key functionality, and where the market is headed next. And if you need guidance on where you should take your healthcare digital experiences next, book an inquiry or guidance session with me here. Not a Forrester client? Contact your Forrester account team now to learn more.
Stay tuned as we kick off the inaugural Forrester Wave™ in this space!
